How do you learn about the world outside your personal experience? Where did your worldview come from?

Beyond school and friends/family, the answer is some form of media. At least now, thanks to the internet, we have many more options of who to trust to learn facts and get honest perspectives. But that makes these decisions much harder, with so many alternatives to consider as we look for an understanding of reality but also try to avoid getting stuck in comfortably biased echo chambers.

But working against us in many ways is the media’s self-interest. They have a natural bias, as everyone does, but they also need to pay for their work, and perhaps even make a profit. This results in what I call the attention-persuasion complex. It is unavoidable. They want our attention, and at some level, want to persuade us of something, now or in the future.

Usually, the problem is not with the creator. They want to express themselves or educate us. Their bias is usually obvious and easily dealt with. The issue is with the network and/or advertisers. They pay the creator based on the attention/persuasion achieved, and so exert pressure on the creator or us as consumers to make this happen. Every overt or sneaky psychological method to succeed is considered. That’s the battle we’re up against, and most people don’t even know it.

So while many people point out this problem, I haven’t seen anybody propose a solution. Here is mine:

If we truly believe in the ability of a people to rule themselves, we need to have a somewhat shared understanding of our world. I think the story of our cultural and political moment is that this seems to have slipped away. Therefore, any true political reform must have a larger vision. It must address the public access to information and how our opinions are expertly manipulated. While bias is inherent, letting the power of a few shape the understanding of the many is a choice. What we are missing and need desperately is both to hear more independent voices from all perspectives, but then also to engage in the constructive criticism of all ideas. It is only this process that can let us understand how to best live and thrive together.

To get there, I argue there are four necessary pieces to this new kind of politics…

Support Independent Media

There will always be more to gain individually from creating bias than trying to advance public understanding. It is this natural state of things that when combined with any real concern for the common good, necessitates a pooling of public resources to try to overcome. We have to collectively provide the financial support for media to avoid the commercial influence of networks and advertisers. This will help to limit the culture’s general exposure to bullshit and make facts and reason more prevalent in the public discourse. There are people willing to do this work in art and journalism, but we have to make it part of our civic duty to fund it. Free from control by government and other special interests, with content available to all.

Regular Local Meetings to Discuss Politics

We have all had different life experiences, and exposure to information, that shape our understanding. Better government at all levels requires that all of these different perspectives be heard and that we embrace compromise. As much as we can learn from all the forms of media now available, overcoming our most stubborn differences will probably always require the empathy that only comes from ongoing public conversations in a shared space. Expanding public understanding, and the immunity to political propaganda that comes with it, is the only real way to take back our government.

Make Political Parties Irrelevant

In a low-information environment, political parties were very useful. Voters could use them as branding to get a general understanding of the policy positions of politicians. But the parties also always had their problems, problems that now outweigh whatever usefulness the parties still provide. In general, they act like just another special interest. They restrict candidates from following their conscience on how best to serve their constituents’ interests. They also create a divide in the electorate that is corrosive to the body politic. They allow the media to focus more on politics than policy. We must make it easier, starting at nearly impossible in some districts, to run and win as an independent candidate.

Distributed Social Media

Without a gatekeeper, social media is word-of-mouth on steroids. It allows us to democratically control what we pay attention to and how we are influenced, thus giving us more freedom in how we live our lives. Information has never been so available as it is on the internet, or easy to consume quickly as it is with social media. While we actually don’t need anyone or their algorithm modifying that content feed for us, it is unavoidable in our current model because of the financial pressure that comes from the advertising opportunity. The only way out is to collectively move to an independent, distributed but also interconnected platform we control, giving us real choice.

The election of Trump is serving as a tipping point, causing many Americans to finally wonder if something has fundamentally changed in our civic life. How is this possible? My contention is that Trump took advantage of some changing conditions, but his win is actually firmly rooted in the thesis of Jon Stewart’s final monologue on The Daily Show, “Bullshit is everywhere”. This situation is a multi-generational phenomenon, a simple function of the incentives behind the attention economy and persuasion techniques. While we all have a public interest in a well-informed and compassionate society, there is an overwhelming profit available to creators in capturing our attention and selling it to others, in order to bias us towards some opinion or product. That is why commercial media continually expands, and has come to dominate how we understand our world.

What has now changed is widespread access to the internet, and we are starting to see its full effects on culture and society. In regards to how it affects our understanding of reality, it has both vastly simplified the process of researching facts, but also expanded and accelerated the reach of commercial media into our lives. We can debunk the lies like never before, if we have the time and do the work and know where to look. But the way that the internet has broken down distribution barriers for media, has also led to a competitive race to the bottom, with more desperate attempts to get our attention by new and old companies alike. So while it’s the same old game of attention and persuasion, we’re forced to spend more of our precious time weeding out bad information than ever before. It leaves us all with a deeper sense of unease.

What Trump did was to take advantage of both sides, our disillusionment with the news media and their desperate search for profits. He accelerated the rising distrust of the media by repeatedly attacking them, leading many to largely dismiss their criticism of him. But at the same time, his inflammatory commentary created such attention-grabbing content that media covered him endlessly for the advertising money. They did so by leaving him free to speak to the vast majority of the public for hours, making huge promises but also directing them how to exactly fact-check his opponent. He distracted from his own lies while showing the dishonest interplay between the media and politics, tainting his opponent. He left a lot of Americans feeling unsure of what to believe, while berating them with an avalanche of what they wanted to believe, without any policy or facts to consider.

But it is too easy to dismiss the campaign as an anomaly, and miss an important opportunity for change. The media has failed the public interest for years, and that’s at the core of our broken public sphere. Every kind of paid media campaign now exists, taking up your attention and working to persuade you, crowding out word-of-mouth movements that would more fairly represent the will of the people. As we live more of our lives within the attention economy, money is spent to buy up ever more of our time. In the long term, the public good cannot be served by this culturally overwhelming business model that exists primarily to mislead us.

The only real solution is to push back against commercial media culture by unselfishly supporting public media. We must have an aggressive and relentless pursuit of facts and the wide-ranging truth of human experience, in the best traditions of journalism and artistic endeavor, even when it challenges our interests or assumptions. Funded by everyone at the level their means allows, with content available to everyone for free, would make this model viable for every creator. A society-wide refusal to accept the current path we are on, along with the potential of new technology, now makes this alternative possible. It must be embraced by creators and citizens alike, and seen at some level, as a civic responsibility. That’s what we really need.

Illinois is broken because we have had decades of placing politics above policy. The focus has been short-term, on the next election, instead of long-term, and what is best for our state. Personal interests and wealth over the public good. A complete unwillingness to make hard choices and use their time with the people to inform and educate about the problems and what is necessary. Instead, it is all lies and attacking the other side in ads and mailings. Wasted money on unnecessary and unqualified patronage to serve as campaign staff. While it is a bipartisan problem, it might be most clearly seen in 30 years of Madigan being both speaker and leader of the Democratic party. He controls what gets voted on to ensure he can attack or defend those votes on the campaign side. He also allocates money and campaign staff, making candidates almost an accessory. While Rauner is outright buying out the Republican party to push his personal priorities over everything else, he is using loopholes selfishly maintained by Madigan to do so.

We have to do three things if we hope to fix this. First, we have to elect independents.

What I mean by independents are people who will look into our problems, work hard to educate the electorate about the system and explain what they think should be done to fix them, have open dialogue and be willing to change based on new ideas, and then propose good bills and vote independent of politics or party. For this to work, candidates have to reject typical politics. Don’t run attack ads or mailings. Otherwise, your opponent will be scared to speak publicly or make that difficult vote, for fear of an out-of-context attack. And the public gets deprived of further understanding, from multiple perspectives. It is only an engaged and informed electorate that can save any democracy, but candidates can inspire us toward our better selves.

The next two steps build off of independent candidates, and they are what those candidates should support: making it easier for more independents to get elected and responsible, structural budget reforms.

We should make it a lot easier for anybody without political connections for run for office in Illinois. More competition would make for better representation, just as it improves life in every other part of our society:

Getting on the ballot requires gathering a lot of signatures. That is called ballot access. Usually that means you need other people to help you do that. Let’s lower the number of signatures required but also require candidates to gather the signatures by themselves. That would both make it easier for anyone to do and make candidates more accessible to the public.

Move primary elections into late spring or early summer, and vote on the weekend. This would make it easier for the average candidate to meet voters and make it easier for everyone to vote.

Within the bounds of free speech, limit the power of big money or big organizations to affect elections. Other states do this, and we should follow their lead. We can write stricter laws and force more transparency on how money is moved around to fund campaigns or even directly influence candidates.

Implement what is called Ranked Choice or Instant Runoff Voting. This could also eliminate primaries completely. It is already done in many elections and involves ranking candidates based on your own personal preference for each office instead of just voting for one. When ballots are tallied, this process allows us to avoid the phenomenon of having to vote for the lesser evil.

We should have legislative leadership term limits, but term limits on legislators only make sense as a last ditch effort at political reform. When it seems that the system is rigged to make incumbency too powerful, this is an option. I think that is where we are. But once we can fix the other problems, they should be removed as they are undemocratic at their core. If someone wants to serve and their constituents want them to, they should be able to. This does not apply to legislative leadership term limits where the only limit is on the legislators, not the voters.

Underlying all the other issues in Illinois and of most immediate concern is the budget. We must make responsible, structural reforms to move the state forward. These will be huge and difficult compromises that require real sacrifice. Failure by the electorate to understand these issues has led to bad politics and where we are today.

The fact is we need more revenue in Illinois. There is a lot of waste, fraud and abuse in state government that we need to eliminate as soon as possible, but not enough to avoid the huge increase in revenue we need. That is depressing, but more money will provide for a better state in the future, less debt financing and lower taxes in other areas. We must switch to a graduated income tax in order the raise this revenue in an affordable way, and that requires a constitutional amendment.

Next is reform of all of our pension systems, including the one for Chicago teachers. The best example of how this should work is the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund. State law requires that local governments make the payments and a unified system eliminates overhead. This state-local split eliminates the ability for the responsible party to skip payments. The party responsible for payments is also the entity determining future demand with hiring and salary decisions. Of course, the state will continue to play a large part in funding the systems but will now do so through a reformed structure with proper incentives in place.

And last is education reform such that schools are both better and more equally funded throughout the state, and property taxes can be alleviated. Once we begin to treat the Chicago teacher pensions like all other teacher pensions, we must also treat their school district like all other school districts regarding funding. One formula, reformed to better account for more expensive exceptions as they arise, with more state funding for all. As it says in the state constitution. With enough money but also with every local area paying its fair share, this will also lower property taxes. Retain local control with limited testing to ensure a proper base of education for all. It will be costly but all spent appropriately on our most important resource, our children but also our future workforce and citizens to guide our democracy.

We need a vision. I wrote this as a framework for my understanding of what’s needed in state government going forward and as a way to explain to others my position on candidates. Going beyond political parties is hard, and we need firm ideas to guide us in this new territory. How to balance a compassionate worldview with the best ideas to get the world we want in a sea of corruption. This is the best I could come up with.

This is not just about country music. Rock had the same problem in the 1980’s until SoundScan came along and forced the industry to reconsider what people really wanted to hear. It is the problem with the radio and popular music now. It is much easier to sign a few acts and use promotion to make some of them huge and cash in. It is easier to sell ads by creating stations with music or talk that appeals to a certain demographic.

reading Girl With Curious Hair and very much enjoying Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way. yet more DFW all about advertising. our culture is broken. I need to find my people. JRE fans, No Agenda fans, DFW fans. they see beyond the bullshit of this world. JRE does it as via drugs and comedy, No Agenda guys were taught media tricks directly, and I don’t know how DFW learned to do it. Sadly, it seems part of his depression. I understand that. There is just such a sense of disconnection from others who live in a world of bullshit. How do I make money with a head like this?

That’s what I’m going to start calling my political philosophy. It means that I like competition in all areas of life and see the value in our economic system, but that it must serve the public interest. And it fails in a lot of ways, but the best solution is then to try to fix its shortcomings by causing the least distortion possible. Or force negative externalities back onto those who caused them. Just as the market system is built on certain artificial legal structures, we may need to help those born with an unfair disadvantage, provide new structures like the internet or other infrastructure to create a more competitive environment, or break up entities that have reduced competition in various sectors.

And in paying for public goods, we should place the burden on those best able to pay and where doing so will have the least disruptive effect on the market – the wealthy. Reduce taxes everywhere else as much as possible, excepting fees that pay for something that lacks general public value and restricting deterrence taxation to alleviating the related negative externality.

Your mobile number is like a domain name. You basically own it, but some central organization provides oversight of the database of numbers. They subcontract much of that management out to the carriers, but you can take the number with you when you change carriers. Just like owning a domain name and changing registrars.

Your mobile number is linked to your personal device that is almost always with you and is already used as a 2nd level of authentication.

Why not take the next step? Use your mobile number as your personal identification on the network. Merge the idea of a domain registrar and hosting company. Instead of having to create a new account, password, and giving out your email address each time you sign up for a new online service or download a new app, just give them your mobile number. That new service/app then uses the number to query your mobile number host, and you choose what information to pass over to the service/app. Eventually, your mobile number host has an app that you install, and every time it gets queried, it notifies your mobile device and you can decide what information to allow it to access.

We take back control. Our contacts become just a list of mobile numbers, and as long as we’ve been confirmed by the other person, our apps read the current info from their database in real time. Calls get intermediated unless we’ve already confirmed that number. We create competition in the mobile number host space based on security, cost, and service. Social networking, texting, and VOIP become protocols. We win.

I am unemployed. I am getting in shape – running and working out everyday for months now. I am learning Ruby on Rails. I am actually building Public Patron. I am volunteering for Chuy for Mayor of Chicago when I can. I am freezing in my basement office. My daughter is learning jiu-jitsu. My dad has kidney cancer and I am visiting him nightly to help with his catheter, medicine, and feet. I am going to NOLA in April for a friend’s wedding.

Followers. One immense sheep herd. Dancing, twirling, going ape-shit for the unknown dream. I can see it so clearly now. We are fooling ourselves. Necessity, simple need, has led me to this conclusion. No single collection of songs or literature can encompass or transcend it. Once again, it seems that there is an opportunity to “Do something”…but what can be done? What can be done when every aspect of modern existence is monetarily owned? When power-crazed, megalomaniacal, business men infect minds with their subliminal marketing and turn common men into thieves or vagabonds or unwitting slaves?

Drink it up. Smoke it up. Fuck it. Suck it. Tear your fellow comrades down. Listen to the steady thump of the dead beat. It is the sound of your own heart. The parade is unyielding as we march enthusiastically into oblivion. We, as the common people cannot protect ourselves against oncoming wilderness. For we have been rendered helpless by instantaneous gratification. Our politics, religion, music, art, communication & necessary skills have been pre-selected. We must stay in-between the lines that have been painted by the state, by the taste makers, by the media etc. We must go through the proper channels to convey messages, to get a companion, to be accepted. Even I, who took a detour, have ended up here, on some kind of main road. If not, we are excised, cut off, turned into mad men. Even modern anarchy has become a stale joke. Love is for sale.